Listened to Coltrane's A Love Supreme again last night. Late. Lights off. Nothing but the speakers and the dark. Forty years I've been returning to this album, and it still catches me off guard—the way prayer can sound like this, all brass and breath and searching.
The opening chant feels like stepping into a cathedral you didn't know existed. Coltrane builds these massive sonic walls and then tears them down, note by note, until you're standing in something intimate and overwhelming at once. Elvin Jones on drums doesn't keep time so much as he bends it, makes it elastic. You can feel him pushing against the structure, testing what it can hold.
People talk about spiritual jazz like it's some rarefied category, but this album is just a man trying to say thank you. Trying to find the vocabulary for grace. There's an urgency in Coltrane's saxophone—this sense that he's running out of time to get it all out, every feeling, every revelation. The way he circles a phrase, repeats it, transforms it. Like watching someone learn a new language in real time.
McCoy Tyner's piano work in "Resolution" is what devotion sounds like. Those chords are architecture. They build space for the whole quartet to move inside. And when Jimmy Garrison's bass comes in, grounding everything, it's like finding solid earth after floating.
What strikes me most is how generous this music is. It doesn't ask you to understand bebop theory or jazz history. It asks you to feel. To pay attention. To notice the conversation happening between these four musicians who trusted each other enough to get completely lost together.
I think about how Coltrane recorded this in one session. December 1964. One day. Like he'd been carrying it inside him and finally found the moment to let it out. There's no pretense here, no showing off. Just four people making something sacred out of instruments and air.
Put this on late at night when the world gets too loud. Let it wash over you. Notice where your breath changes. Where you lean forward. Where you close your eyes. That's the album working.
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